Posts Tagged ‘AntMiner’

Have you looked at the specifications of the currently available generation of Bitcoin ASICs lately while considering getting a miner in order to get some coins at home? As Bitcoin network difficulty is progressively increasing every ~13 days, the hardware manufacturers are already hitting the limits of the 28nm production technology and the BTC exchange rate stays at low levels things are not looking good. We have checked what you can expect to earn with some of the SHA-256 ASIC miners for Bitcoin and have done some calculations that you can see below using the current network difficulty as a base.

Looking at the list of miners above you can see that they are actually not that many options available that you are currently able to order and get very soon in your own hands. There are some miners available for pre-order with next month shipping or Q1 2015 expected availability for example but we have not included these. KnCMiner’s Neptune is also not included as these are not being sold at the moment and even if they did at the last listed price nobody would be buying them anyway. We have not listed some other miners from companies that are supposed to be shipping, but we have not found a single trustworthy review or confirmation from anyone that actually received a product from them.

Do note that the above numbers represent what you can earn with the hashrate that the specific ASIC miner provides with a Bitcoin network difficulty remaining at 35,002,482,026 for the duration of the whole specified period. Also these numbers represent the mined coins and you would need to subtract the costs for the electricity from them based on the power usage for the miner and your electricity prices per kWh in order to get an actual profit you will get. As you can see even 2 THS are already not that much and you are going to mine less than 1 BTC per month with this hashrate and with the current sub $400 USD price for Bitcoin when you subtract the electricity fee (can get to half the mined coins) things do not look promising. So for small time miners Bitcoin mining with ASIC miners is not very interesting anymore and even for larger farms things might not be that bright as you might think, so it is no surprise that some of these are selling their hashrate in the form of cloud services. The only thing that could make Bitcoin mining attractive to normal users again is a significant increase in the price of BTC, so you can be mining now and keeping the mined coins waiting for that to happen…

BitMain has listed the upcoming ~500 GHS AntMiner S3 Bitcoin ASIC miner on their website based on the new 28nm BM1382 chips that were recently announced. The AntMiner S3 should start shipping from July 10th with a price set at 0.75 BTC, so you can already pre-order your unit if you are interested. The initial effective hash rate for the S2 was announced to be 504 GHS plus/minus 5% and now it seem that Bitmain has lowered it a bit to 478 GHS, though the unit should be overclockable to 500 GHS or more. The power consumption for the 500 GHS hashrate that was previously announced was 390W on wall and now with the official hashrate lowered a bit the power usage is also a bit lower at 366 Watt.

Do note that the BitMain AntMiner S3 ships without a PSU. There are 4 PCI-e connectors for +12V DC input, but it apparently needs only two of them to be connected if you are not going to be overclocking the device, so the other two are required only if you do plan to overclock the device.

BitMain and their 55nm BM1380 SHA256 ASIC chip and the miners that the company has released based on it are quite popular and now the company has announced that they are ready with their new 28nm ASIC chip – the BM1382. As you can already guess the new chips will be offering higher performance at a lower power consumption, so you can get more powerful miners with the same size and power usage as the previous generation with the help of the new chips. The track record of the company is so far very good thanks to the fact that they are not using pre-orders, but ship from stock and announce products when they are ready for shipping, so you can get them fast at a good price and start hashing right away.

BM1382 has achieved 15.75 Gh/s in hash performance, consuming less than 9.33 W on chip level at 0.75V. This means 0.59 J/GH on chip. If the core voltage is at 0.63V, the efficiency will be 0.40 J/GH on chip. BM1382 will bring the power efficiency of Bitcoin mining industry to a new level which has not been massively achieved before. BM1382 represents a 20% power saving on its previous generation of 55nm chips and nearly 10 times of better physical densification, which will further improve the safety of the decentralized ecosystem.

The first devices that we already expect to be available, probably by the end of this month, from BitMain based on the new BM1382 ASIC chips will be the AntMiner S3 miners. Devices, that will follow the design of the very popular AntMiner S1 blade miner. According to BitMain each S3 should be using 32 BM1382 chips and be able to provide a hashrate of 504 GHS with a power consumption of about 390W from the wall. So this is close to almost 3 times the hashrate of the old S1 with pretty much the same power consumption, not bad at all, but we also need to see this coupled with an attractive price. The new S3 miners have the potential to become a great option for smaller miners that want to be able to mine Bitcoin or other SHA-256 crypto currencies.

We don’t know what the exact price will be, but considering that the company is able to offer 1 THS miner based on the 55nm older chips for a price of $1850 USD at the moment, the half of that hashrate and smaller and easier to produce new AntMiner S3 ASIC miners should be not more than lets say $750 USD, but that is actually a bit expensive. They need to be sold at a price of about 1 BTC or even less in order to become really more interesting for the users and to offer a foreseeable return of investment and some profit for the miners.

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